Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism is a worldview that is centered on Western civilization or a biased view that favors it over non-western civilizations. The exact scope of centrism varies from the entire Western world to just the continent of Europe or even more narrowly, to Western Europe. When the term is applied to history, it may be used in reference to an apologetic stance towards European colonialism and other forms of imperialism.
The term Eurocentrism dates back to the late 1970s but it did not become prevalent until the 1990s, when it was frequently applied in the context of decolonization and development and humanitarian aid that industrialised countries offered to developing countries.
Terminology
The adjective Eurocentric, or Europe-centric, has been in use in various contexts since at least the 1920s. The term was popularised in the context of decolonization and internationalism in the mid-20th century. English usage of Eurocentric as an ideological term in identity politics was current by the mid-1980s.The abstract noun Eurocentrism as the term for an ideology was coined in the 1970s by the Egyptian Marxian economist Samir Amin, then director of the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Amin used the term in the context of a global, core-periphery or dependency model of capitalist development. English usage of Eurocentrism is recorded by 1979.
The coinage of Western-centrism is younger, attested in the late 1990s, and specific to English.
History
European exceptionalism
During the European colonial era, encyclopedias often sought to give a rationale for the predominance of European rule during the colonial period by referring to a special position taken by Europe compared to the other continents.Thus, Johann Heinrich Zedler, in 1741, wrote that "even though Europe is the smallest of the world's four continents, it has for various reasons a position that places it before all others.... Its inhabitants have excellent customs, they are courteous and erudite in both sciences and crafts".
The Brockhaus Enzyklopädie of 1847 still has an ostensibly Eurocentric approach and claims about Europe that "its geographical situation and its cultural and political significance is clearly the most important of the five continents, over which it has gained a most influential government both in material and even more so in cultural aspects".
European exceptionalism thus grew out of the Great Divergence of the Early Modern period, due to the combined effects of the Scientific Revolution, the Commercial Revolution, and the rise of colonial empires, the Industrial Revolution and a Second European colonization wave.
European exceptionalism is widely reflected in popular genres of literature, especially literature for young adults and adventure literature in general. Portrayal of European colonialism in such literature has been analysed in terms of Eurocentrism in retrospect, such as presenting idealised and often exaggeratedly masculine Western heroes, who conquered 'savage' peoples in the remaining 'dark spaces' of the globe.
The European miracle, a term coined by Eric Jones in 1981, refers to this surprising rise of Europe during the Early Modern period. During the 15th to 18th centuries, a great divergence took place, comprising the European Renaissance, age of discovery, the formation of the colonial empires, the Age of Reason, and the associated leap forward in technology and the development of capitalism and early industrialisation. The result was that by the 19th century, European powers dominated world trade and world politics.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of History, claimed that world history started in Asia but shifted to Greece and Italy, and then north of the Alps to France, Germany and England. According to Hegel, India and China are stationary countries which lack inner momentum. China replaced the real historically development with a fixed, stable scenario, which makes it the outsider of world history. Both India and China were waiting and anticipating a combination of certain factors from outside until they can acquire real progress in human civilization. Hegel's ideas had a profound impact on western history. Some scholars disagree with his ideas that the Oriental countries were outside of world history.
Max Weber suggested that capitalism is the specialty of Europe, and Oriental countries such as India and China do not contain sufficient factors to develop capitalism. Weber wrote many treatises to publicize the distinctiveness of Europe. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'', he wrote that the "rational" capitalism manifested by its enterprises and mechanisms only appear in the Protestant western countries, and a series of generalized and universal cultural phenomena only appear in the west. Even the state, with a written constitution and a government organized by trained administrators and constrained by rational law, only appear in the west, even though other regimes can also comprise states. Rationality is a multi-layered term whose connotations are developed and escalated as with the social progress. Weber regarded rationality as a proprietary article for western capitalist society.
Anticolonialism
Even in the 19th century, anticolonial movements had developed claims about national traditions and values that were set against those of Europe in Africa and India. In some cases, as China, where local ideology was even more exclusionist than the Eurocentric one, Westernisation did not overwhelm longstanding Chinese attitudes to its own cultural centrality, but some would state that idea itself is a rather desperate attempt to cast Europe in a good light by comparison.Orientalism developed in the late 18th century as a disproportionate Western interest in and idealization of Eastern cultures.
By the early 20th century, some historians, such as Arnold J. Toynbee, were attempting to construct multifocal models of world civilizations. Toynbee also drew attention in Europe to non-European historians, such as the medieval Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun. He also established links with Asian thinkers, such as through his dialogues with Daisaku Ikeda of Soka Gakkai International.
The explicit concept of Eurocentrism is a product of the period of decolonisation in the 1960s to 1970s. Its original context is the core-periphery or dependency model of capitalist development of Marxian economics.
Debate since 1990s
Eurocentrism has been a particularly important concept in development studies.Brohman argued that Eurocentrism "perpetuated intellectual dependence on a restricted group of prestigious Western academic institutions that determine the subject matter and methods of research".
In treatises on historical or contemporary Eurocentrism that appeared since the 1990s, Eurocentrism is mostly cast in terms of dualisms such as civilized/barbaric or advanced/backward, developed/undeveloped, core/periphery, implying "evolutionary schemas through which societies inevitably progress", with a remnant of an "underlying presumption of a superior white Western self as referent of analysis". Eurocentrism and the dualistic properties that it labels on non-European countries, cultures and persons have often been criticized in the political discourse of the 1990s and 2000s, particularly in the greater context of political correctness, race in the United States and affirmative action.
In the 1990s, there was a trend of criticizing various geographic terms current in the English language as Eurocentric, such as the traditional division of Eurasia into Europe and Asia or the term Middle East.
Eric Sheppard, in 2005, argued that contemporary Marxism itself has Eurocentric traits, because it supposes that the third world must go through a stage of capitalism before "progressive social formations can be envisioned".
Andre Gunder Frank harshly criticized Eurocentrism. He believed that most scholars were the disciples of the social sciences and history guided by Eurocentrism. He criticized some Western scholars for their ideas that non-Western areas lack outstanding contributions in history, economy, ideology, politics and culture compared with the West. These scholars believed that the same contribution made by the West gives Westerners an advantage of endo-genetic momentum which is pushed towards the rest of the world, but Frank believed that the Oriental countries also contributed to the human civilization in their own perspectives.
Arnold Toynbee in his A Study of History, gave a critical remark on Eurocentrism. He believed that although western capitalism shrouded the world and achieved a political unity based on its economy, the Western countries cannot "westernize" other countries. Toynbee concluded that Eurocentrism is characteristic of three misconceptions manifested by self-centerment, the fixed development of Oriental countries and linear progress.
There has been some debate on whether historical Eurocentrism qualifies as "just another ethnocentrism", as it is found in most of the world's cultures, especially in cultures with imperial aspirations, as in the Sinocentrism in China; in the Empire of Japan, or during the American Century. James M. Blaut argued that Eurocentrism indeed went beyond other ethnocentrisms, as the scale of European colonial expansion was historically unprecedented and resulted in the formation of a "colonizer's model of the world".
Race and politics in the United States
The terms Afrocentrism vs. Eurocentrism have come to play a role in the 2000s to 2010s in the context of the political discourse on race in the United States and critical whiteness studies, aiming to expose white supremacism and white privilege.Afrocentrist scholars, such as Molefi Asante, have argued that there is a prevalence of Eurocentric thought in the processing of much of academia on African affairs. On the other hand, in an article, 'Eurocentrism and Academic Imperialism' by Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, from the University of Tehran, states that Eurocentric thought exists in almost all aspects of academia in many parts of the world, especially in the humanities. Edgar Alfred Bowring states that in the West, self-regard, self-congratulation and denigration of the 'Other' run more deeply and those tendencies have infected more aspects of their thinking, laws and policy than anywhere else. Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt have measured the degree of Eurocentrism in the research programs of top history departments. In Southern Europe and Latin America, a number of academic proposals to offer alternatives to the Eurocentric perspective have emerged, such as the project of the Epistemologies of the South by Portuguese scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos and those of the Subaltern Studies groups in India and Latin America (the Modernity/Coloniality Group of Anibal Quijano, Edgardo Lander, Enrique Dussel, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Ramón Grosfoguel, and others.
Latin America
Eurocentrism affected Latin America through colonial domination and expansion. This occurred through the application of new criteria meant to "impose a new social classification of the world population on a global scale". Based on this occurrence, a new social-historic identities were newly produced, although already produced in America. Some of these names include; 'Whites', 'Negroes', 'Blacks', 'Yellows', 'Olives', 'Indians', and 'Mestizos'. With the advantage of being located in the Atlantic basin, 'Whites' were in a privileged to control gold and silver production. The work which created the product was by 'Indians' and 'Negroes'. With the control of commercial capital from 'White' workers. And therefore, Europe or Western Europe emerged as the central place of new patterns and capitalist power.Effect on beauty standards in Brazil
According to Alexander Edmond's book Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil, whiteness plays a role in Latin American, specifically Brazilian, beauty standards, but it is not necessarily distinguished based on skin color. Edmonds said the main ways to define whiteness in people in Brazil is by looking at their hair, nose, then mouth before considering skin color. Edmonds focuses on the popularity of plastic surgery in Brazilian culture. Plastic surgeons usually applaud and flatter mixtures when emulating aesthetics for performing surgery, and the more popular mixture is African and European. This shapes beauty standards by racializing biological and popular beauty ideals to suggest that mixture with whiteness is better. Donna Goldstein's book Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown also addresses how whiteness influences beauty in Brazil. Goldstein notes that in Brazil, there is a hierarchy for beauty that places being white at the top and black characteristics at the bottom, calling them ugly.Challenging these standards of beauty in Brazil would require society to "question the romantic and sexual appeal of whiteness." Goldstein said as a result, black bodies would have to be decommodified, and black women in particular have had to commodify their bodies to survive.
In Erica Lorraine William's Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements, Williams addresses how European and white beauty standards have more privileges than darker skinned and black women in Brazil. Black women in Brazil have to strategize ways to receive more respect in spaces popular for sex tourism. Williams cites Alma Gulliermoprieto when she explains that there is a superiority given to light-skinned black women over darker-skinned black women as light-skinned women were considered more beautiful because they were "improved with white blood."
Eurocentric identifier shape beauty standards through skin color and physical features, creating beauty hierarchy that gives privileges of power and respect to women who are mixed with whiteness.
Islamic world
Eurocentrism's effect on the Islamic world has predominantly come from a fundamental statement of preventing the account of lower-level explanation and account of Islamic cultures and their social evolution, mainly through eurocentrism's idealist construct. This construct has gained power from the historians revolving their conclusions around the idea of a central point that favors the notion that the evolution of societies and their progress are dictated by general tendencies, leading to the Islamic world's evolution becoming more of a philosophical topic of history instead of historical fact. Along with this, eurocentrism extends to trivialize and marginalize the philosophies, scientific contributions, cultures, and other additional facets of the Islamic world.Stemming from Eurocentrism's innate bias towards Western civilization came the creation of the concept of the "European Society," which favored the components of European civilization and allowed eurocentrists to brand diverging societies and cultures as "uncivilized." Prevalent during the nineteenth century, the labeling of uncivilized in the eyes of eurocentrists enabled Western countries to classify non-European and non-white countries as inferior, and limit their inclusion and contribution in actions like international law. This exclusion was seen as acceptable by individuals like John Westlake, a professor of international law at the University of Cambridge at the time, who commented that countries with European civilizations should be who comprises the international society, and that countries like Turkey and Persia should only be allowed a part of international law. The figurative superiority resulting from the rise of "European Civilization" and the labels of "civilized" and "uncivilized" are partly responsible for eurocentrism's denial of Islamic social evolution, giving westerner's the advantage of an early dismissal of such ideas regarding Oriental civilizations through comparisons to the West. Along with that, the rooted belief of the inferiority of non-white and non-Europeans has given justification for racial discrimination and discredit to the Islamic world, with much of these feelings still present today.
Orientalism
Eurocentrism's reach has not only affected the perception of the cultures and civilizations of the Islamic world, but also the aspects and ideas of Orientalism, which was originally created for the true social and cultural milestones of the Islamic and Oriental world to be represented. This effect began to take place during the nineteenth century when the Orientalist ideals where distilled and shifted from topics of sensuality and deviating mentalities to what is described by Edward Said as "unchallenged coherence." Along with this shift came the creation of two types of orientalism: latent, which covered the Orient's constant durability through history, and manifest, a more dynamic orientalism that changes with the new discovery of information. The eurocentric influence is shown in the latter, as the nature of manifest Orientalism is to be altered with new findings, which leaves it vulnerable to the warping of its refiner's ideals and principles. In this state, eurocentrism has used orientalism to portray the Orient as "backwards" and bolster the superiority of the Western world and continue the undermining of their cultures to further the agenda of racial inequality.With those wanting to represent the eurocentric ideals better by way of orientalism, there came a barrier of languages, being Arabic, Persian, and other similar languages. With more researchers wanting to study more of Orientalism, there was an assumption made about the languages of the Islamic world: that having the ability to transcribe the texts of the past Islamic world would give great knowledge and insight on oriental studies. In order to do this, many researchers underwent training in philology, believing that an understanding of the languages would be the only necessary training. This reasoning came as the belief at the time was that other studies like anthropology and sociology were deemed irrelevant as they did not believe it misleading to this portion of mankind. Through this action, eurocentric researchers' understanding of Oriental and Islamic culture was intentionally left undermined, foregoing the reasoning behind the actions and reasoning for the changes in culture documented by Islamic and Oriental texts and allowing for further possible Western influence on orientalism, and increasing the difficulty of identifying what is truly Oriental and what is considered Oriental by the West.
In the beauty industry
Eurocentrism has affected the beauty realm globally. The beauty standard has become westernized and has influenced people throughout the globe. Many have altered their natural self to reflect this image. Many beauty and advertising companies have redirected their products to support this idea of Eurocentrism.Kathy Deliovsky, an assistant professor at Brock University, publishes work that focuses on "critical race feminism with an emphasis on whiteness studies.
Deliovsky addresses Eurocentrism and whiteness in relation to beauty in her article "Normative White Femininity: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Beauty." She writes that "normative femininity is never signified outside a process of racial domination and negation" when looking at a society built on "European imperialism and colonialism." White femininity, like whiteness in general is perceived, is viewed as normative because it isn't viewed as white, but just as femininity.
Deliovsky later addresses how those who are represented through a Westernized lens as blonde-haired and blue-eyed in society are typically white women. She points out an importance of also looking at who isn't being represented and what the implications of that are as they could reveal two issues: the past exclusion of "Africans, Asians and Aboriginals" from editorial and advertisement content and then distorted "representation and coverage" of "racially marginalized" people.
Deliovsky explains in her article that when a standard of beauty is determined, anything that strays from that standard is considered a "deviation." Women of color could be viewed as "contextually beautiful," but don't exist as the standard. They can represent the "exotic/erotic" but not the beautiful.